Black carcasses should not be part of the curriculum

During our younger years at secondary school, our teacher grazed over the topic of the slave trade. It was a mere paragraph in the textbook which casually explained it as a factor in the Industrial Revolution of Britain. I distinctly remember my history teacher fumbling over her words; she couldn’t decide whether to use “coloured”, “African” or “black” to describe the enslaved people. One thing she didn’t hesitate with was showing us was the gaunt, shackled bodies of said enslaved people. There were illustrated diagrams demonstrating the layout of slave ships, which were filled to the brim with nothing but enchained Africans. The features of the slaves in the boat were exaggerated to look distinctly African, and the illustrator had clearly taken the time to draw tiny afros on every slave. The pain of the black Africans in this image did all the talking that my white history teacher did not want to do. Fast forward to upper school, and the same technique was used again so we could understand the American Civil Rights Movement. After all, it is a well-established fact that Martin Luther King framed a good proportion of his movement so that racial violence was brought to the forefront of television screens and newspapers, is it not? We looked at images of white crowds scream, attack, and throw objects at African Americans engaging in peaceful protests. We saw police dogs and waterpipes unleashed on African American protesters. It all functioned to show the vitriol and hatred white people had for black people “back in the day”. But no black pain was unjustified or too much; we looked at the lifeless hanging bodies of lynched black men, Emmett Till’s mutilated body and every other dead black body that could “explain something”. When I refer to “we” I mean an entirely white class, and me, the only black person. It was awkward, but my complaint could never be warranted. These were historical events and this black pain existed. I could not be offended seeing it because we had to be taught it existed. By the time I reached my undergraduate degree, I had developed an armour for viewing black pain in predominantly white classrooms. Even if I felt uncomfortable, I just had to grit my teeth and get on with it.

Benita Barden in Black carcasses should not be part of the curriculum (Gal-dem)